Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think

249 Pages·2015·3.54 MB·English

by  Patel

REFRAME
Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think
MONA PATEL
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
00. Introduction
01. The Creative Mindset
02. What If You Could Be Creative?
03. Where Are All the Great Ideas?
04. The BS Excuse Personas
05. Creative Openers to Problem Solving
06. 5 Common Obstacles to the Creative Mindset
07. The Reframework: Just Do Wit
08. Get Wit It: Put It All Together
09. Some Advice to Peak Creativity
10. Forward Movement
11. A Mindset Shift: Reframe in Action
12. In Closing: A Movement for Empowerment
Afterword
Notes & References
Copyright © 2015 Mona Patel
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61961-318-8
To all the amazing motivators in my life—especially my boys.
INTRODUCTION
I 2009, I ’ . W
N SPRING WAS SITTING NEXT TO MY BROTHER ON MY PARENTS COUCH E
were having what seemed like the hundredth conversation about starting my own
business. For a decade, I’d been working in user experience, which is,
essentially, understanding how people think and behave and then designing
products and experiences with that at the forefront.
As a design researcher, my goal was to help my client get more customers to
understand, use, and enjoy their interactions with that client’s products, services,
and/or brands. To do that, I studied human motivation: What drives people?
What persuades them to take an action, especially regarding new digital devices?
What makes people change their behavior, or even better, what causes them to
behave in ways that benefit others?
My job was to manage teams who interviewed and observed users of various
products and to report back to the company (in the form of designs) how to
better meet the customers’ needs. I worked on more than 100 projects, including
redesigning websites, web applications, a bunch of medical devices, and
consumer products, and I even helped plan the design of retail stores, trading
floors, hospitals, museums, and technologically advanced classrooms. When we
were successful, we could point to money saved or additional money earned as a
result of designing better experiences for their customers, which made clients
result of designing better experiences for their customers, which made clients
(mainly from large companies) come back for more.
Fundamentally, my role as a consultant to those clients was to solve their
problems. Sometimes, the problem had already been solved, and they just
needed someone to validate it, but they trusted me to solve the problem and
come up with a better solution. The more problems I solved, the better I felt
about myself and the more confident I was pursuing more complex problems.
The warm glow of success gave way to the white-hot ambition for the next,
bigger challenge. In a pure, beautiful way, I recognized that problem solving fed
into the human need for contribution, living a life in which we step outside of
ourselves and feel like we have meaning or purpose. We belong to a community
and as humans, that’s important. Thinking “I can do this; I need to do this” led
me to want to solve bigger and tougher problems. It moved me from thinking
about what made a customer click on a BUY button to what enabled that
customer to feel like a responsible, relevant member of a community. Helping
people understand the importance of taking medicine so they are healthier or
educating them on what it means to be financially responsible: these types of
solutions impact people’s happiness and lives—not just my clients’ bottom lines.
Unfortunately, I rarely had the opportunity to implement solutions on that kind
of scale. Over those 10 years, I had developed a number of ideas about what
worked well and what did not in what were now my areas of expertise—market
and user research, as well as visual and interactive design—but life in the agency
world—or any company, for that matter—just didn’t offer the kind of autonomy
needed to think bigger like I wanted. I wanted more independence. I took
inventory of my life and realized that there were a few dreams I was not chasing,
including starting my own company.
This was not news to my family. I had been complaining to them about my
predicament for a while. Yet, I had so many excuses for why I couldn’t start a
business: I didn’t know anything about running a business; we were in a
business: I didn’t know anything about running a business; we were in a
recession, and clients were not spending on design and research; my husband
had just started a company of his own, so we didn’t have a stable income; I
wanted to have kids, so we really needed the medical benefits, as well as the
financial stability; I made a solid six-figure salary, managed a great group of
people, and the company where I worked believed in me and gave me more
freedom than most people had; I didn’t know where to begin or what “LLC”
even stood for; and I didn’t know what kind of company I wanted to start. The
list went on. It just made no sense to start a company.
Luckily, decisions aren’t always made based on sense and rationality. Every
excuse I listed was factually true, but deep down, I still didn’t feel right. I felt
stuck. My brother sensed my dissatisfaction and because he had seen my
presentations overheard client calls, he called me out on being a chicken and a
bratty diva. He pointed out that I had been promoted every year, so any
reservations about not yet knowing enough were clearly contradicted by the facts
on the ground. He pointed out that clients seemed drawn to my authenticity and
drive to truly help them solve their design problems. My straight shooting can
get me into trouble sometimes, but many clients appreciated it, and he felt I
could turn that into a marketable brand that would ignite my passion for this
field and help to design a more beautiful, useable world. He was right.
I wanted change, but I didn’t want to change. I had an inner drive that did not
align with my actions and decisions, and I was complaining about it rather than
doing something about it. I needed to reframe the way I thought.
Maybe this sounds familiar. Taking a risk can be scary. It can be a stupid
decision. It can be hard. It’s so much easier to just complain and not actually do
anything. Maybe it came up in something like learning to ski, cycling across the
country, switching your career, or trying an aerial yoga class. There is probably a
whole list of things you want to do but haven’t tried yet.
Here’s my trick: I replace “What if I can’t?” with “What if I don’t?” and I get the
push that I need to jump and see what happens. What if I don’t face this fear?
How will I feel? Will I be satisfied? I needed to reframe problems as an
opportunities to do something great.
My family is full of entrepreneurs; they’re big thinkers and doers. They are also
my biggest fans. For every excuse I came up with, they came up with a counter
excuse. They talked back to my fear and pushed me from “What if I can’t?”
toward “What if I don’t?” That day, with their prodding me to “jump” and my
brother’s explicit encouragement, the excitement and drive trumped the excuses,
and off I went. I was ready.
But wait, where was I “jumping” to? What did I want to do with my life?
I wanted to eradicate bad design from the world. I strongly believed (and still
do) that design is a medium to influence people. Design is not just about how
something looks. It includes the functional component of how something works
and the emotional component of how it makes people feel. It is about finding
barriers or pain points in an experience and attacking them to make things easy
and simple for users. I had designed e-commerce sites to make people buy more,
health sites to make people register for online programs, and banking sites that
encouraged people to sign up for a credit card. The right design could persuade
people to behave differently. So what? Designing experiences so that people
would click on certain buttons just didn’t feel like enough.
Quickly, I realized that even though I loved solving other people’s problems,
what I really loved was being surrounded by other problem solvers, inspiring
them to take action, and feeling inspired in return. When I felt stuck, I had allies
to help unstick me. They reminded me of what was important. They helped me
brainstorm ideas and options. They helped me overcome my fears.
So, I decided to create a company that helped people, starting with designers, tap